Weird Science At Steiner School

When Dan Dugan attended an open house at the San
Francisco Waldorf School, he thought he'd found the most beautiful
school in the world. The teachers were the most dedicated he'd met
since the nuns he remembered from Catholic school. The teaching
methods seemed very progressive. The children studied subjects in
two-week blocks, and wrote and illustrated their own books, with art
woven into every subject.

A few glimpses of the strange writings of
the school's founder, Rudolf Steiner, raised some questions for
Dugan, but the teachers assured him that Steiner's philosophy did not
appear in the curriculum. They said they used only his teaching
methods.

He enrolled his son in sixth grade, and everything went well
for a year.

Trouble began when Dugan picked up one of Steiner's
books, on sale at the school. Steiner lectured (Germany, 1922): "If
the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become
increasingly dense if men do not arrive at a form of intelligence
that is independent of blondness." How could apparently intelligent
and sensitive people be publishing this stuff in the 1980's? They
would have to be wearing the blinders of cult indoctrination.

Then
his son complained "they're teaching us baby science." A specialist
science teacher had told the sixth grade "the elements are earth,
air, fire, and water." Dugan looked at several science lesson books,
and found more bad news. "Planetary influences" were said to affect
the growth of plants. In physiology, the body was said to be made up
of "the nerve-sense system, the metabolic-muscular system, and the
rhythmic system."

Worse than the occasional items of cult
pseudoscience was what was left out. The science curriculum was based
entirely on observation, and the theories which form the backbone of
scientific knowledge were almost completely omitted. The children
were not to be "prejudiced" by "materialistic dogma," but were to
make up their own minds about how the world worked from direct
observation.

Dugan proposed a parents committee to reform the science
teaching. No other parents were interested.

He requested a hearing
with the "college of teachers" which runs the school. He was refused,
and a delegation of teachers informed him that the family would be
expelled unless he stopped making trouble.

Beaten, they withdrew from
the school. Did all the other parents share Steiner's worldview?
Belief in pseudoscience wasn't mentioned as a requirement when they
were recruited.

Dugan sent a survey to all 270 parents in the school,
asking their positions on a selection of religious, new-age,
scientific, and Steiner beliefs. Thirty-two responded. Most of these
parents agreed with New Age beliefs like reincarnation that Steiner
followers also hold, but almost none knew about or agreed with the
pseudoscientific statements taken from Steiner literature. It appears
that their children were being indoctrinated in weird science without
their knowledge.